Enrico was shaking his head no, his eyes imploring her not to do this. Cassie wondered if he’d even release Evgeny when she asked him to. He might not. She thought of all the mistakes she had made with her life—all the pain she had sown and reaped, all the things she would never have and never do—but she had a feeling now that listening to Evgeny wasn’t going to be one of them.
“What about me?” she asked. “You said that even if I kill you or call the police, there will just be someone else coming after me.”
“You’ll be someone new. Your people will see to it.”
“I assume by my ‘people,’ you don’t mean the airline.”
“Look, Cassie. Think about it. Do you really want to go through life as the Cart Tart Killer? I doubt it. Right now we share something I never expected when I followed you to that bar in the East Village: the need to start again.”
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302: MEGAN BRISCOE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT
DATE: August 7, 2018
MEGAN BRISCOE was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents NANCY SAUNDERS and EMORY LEARY at the FBI office in Washington, D.C.
SAUNDERS conducted the interview; LEARY took these notes.
When asked point blank if she had ever acted as a courier or delivered classified documents or information to a foreign government, she broke down and said that she had. She admitted that she and her husband were both paid by the Russian Federation. He would use his security clearance as a consultant to bring her materials on, most recently, the U.S. chemical weapons defense program at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland, and she in turn would deliver them to her handlers overseas.
She asked for a lawyer, and the interview ended with her arrest and the arrest of her husband.
* * *
= = = = = =
Subsequent to the interview, BRISCOE’S home and garage in Centreville, Virginia, were searched, and two flash drives with classified chemical weapons information were found hidden in an electrical outlet box, behind the plate, in their master bedroom.
Epilogue
REMEMBER THAT PERSON YOU WANTED TO BE? THERE’S STILL TIME.
On the night flight to Moscow, Cassie brought the passenger in 4C his vodka and tonic and hovered over him an extra-long second, a noctivagant cat on the headrest of an easy chair. If she hadn’t known who he really was—or, at least, what the agency had told her about him—she would have pegged him for a retired ice hockey star. The sort of red-haired Russian Adonis who as a very young skater had led his own country’s team to Olympic gold and then taken the NHL by storm in his twenties. He’d clearly broken his nose at least once. His shoulders were still broad, but his hair was thin and his skin was leather. He used reading glasses. She guessed he was, much to her horror, her age.
He wasn’t a hockey player, of course; he was Russian intelligence. Maybe a Cossack, but perhaps a part of the FSB’s Center 18: the cyber spies. After she had absorbed all she could glean from his tablet—two e-mail addresses and some names she barely could spell—she retreated to the first-class galley and wrote down what she saw. She presumed she was giving the agency nothing they didn’t already have. But you never knew. She liked this sort of walk-on role, which was about all they would offer her at this stage. She’d been sober two years now, but she had a long history of drinking to overcome, and so this special surveillance group was the extent of the leash. She had new hair and a new name. She had a new base. And when they needed a flight attendant, they used her. Apparently, they had an Aegean stable–sized pool of actors available for this sort of bit part. And she was good at the work: the circumlocutions of the functioning alcoholic were not unlike the daily subterfuge of a spy.
The irony to this particular assignment, of course, was that an awful lot of what the agency knew about the gentleman in 4C they had learned from Evgeny—or Buckley as she still thought of him sometimes. The passenger was a friend of Viktor’s. Evgeny’s knowledge ranged from drop sites to bank account numbers. He knew what everyone liked to drink and their tastes in women and men. He had a new identity, too, but they were still keeping him in a safe house just outside of Washington, D.C. His debriefing, given his history, could last a lifetime.
Cassie had seen him just one time since Rome. Four months ago, when Masha was almost a year old, a handler had brought them together at an apartment near Dupont Circle. It was maybe a block from the Carnegie Endowment, and the handler had made it clear that this was not where Evgeny lived. The purpose of the meeting was for the Russian to share firsthand what he knew about a woman whom Cassie was supposed to watch on a flight to Beirut. They never told her Evgeny’s new name and he didn’t volunteer it, but his hair now was short, a creamy mix of white and blond, and Cassie wondered if it was bleached or whether the chestnut she recalled when they’d first met had been the dye. Probably his natural color was the shade she recalled from that summer: the nights when they’d danced together at a grunge bar south of her apartment and walked through the West Village beneath a perfect half moon.
Or the night when he’d killed a woman named Elena and tried to kill a man named Enrico. The night when he would just as easily have killed her.
When they met in Washington, Evgeny had struck Cassie as neither happy nor unhappy: mostly he seemed comfortable and businesslike in his new role.
But when he smiled, she glimpsed the playfulness she remembered. Cassie had made a small joke about her boyfriend, a TV writer in L.A., and Evgeny confessed that he had watched a few episodes of the fellow’s show. For a moment Cassie had been taken aback that he knew so much about her, even now, but then she had nodded. Of course he did. Then he’d said, “They really should stick to family drama. WASPy family drama. And if they want me to play the rebellious son who becomes an actor, I’m their man.” His eyes went wide when he said that, and Cassie honestly wasn’t sure if he was pulling her leg.
Before they parted, Cassie had asked if there was anyone he missed in Russia or America. She wasn’t sure why: she guessed it was because they all presumed he was dead. He’d chuckled and said, “Trust me, you don’t want to meet my friends. You just don’t. They make me look pretty damn…American.”
“What does that mean?”
“Wimpy.” Again, she had a sense he was teasing her. But then he sat forward and folded his hands together. “How wimpy, you ask?”
She waited, wondering whether he was going to make a joke at the expense of the United States. But instead he continued. “So wimpy I am very, very glad you screwed up when you loaded that gun. I wouldn’t have wanted you on my conscience.”
“Because…”
“Because you are just too damn much fun. You’re a mess—or, I don’t know, maybe you were a mess—but you sure as hell were good company.” Then he unclasped his fingers as if they were a balloon exploding and added, “And I have a feeling you’re not nearly the shitstorm of a mother you probably figured you’d be.”
She rolled her eyes. “Being sober helps.”
“You named her Masha, right?”
She nodded.
“That can’t possibly be a family name.”
“Tolstoy. The young woman in ‘Happy Ever After.’ She’s my happy ending.”
“God, I remember you reading that,” he said, his own happiness at the recollection genuine. Then: “You still dance barefoot?”
“I have other pleasures. Board books. Sippy cups shaped like animals. Teething.”
He made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue, pretending to reproach her. Then they parted.